The Final Destination franchise

Final Destination (2000)

Rating: B

Dir: James Wong
Star: Devon Sawa, Ali Larter, Kerr Smith, Kerr Smith, Kristen Cloke

Films involving airports can largely be divided into pre- and post-9/11. This just managed to sneak into the former category, and so harkens back to a kinder, gentler time when a trip on a plane did not resemble a shoeless version of the Spanish Inquisition. For example, after Alex Browning (Sawa) has a disturbingly realistic premonition, he runs screaming down the gangway, yelling that the plane is going to blow up. He’s taken off the plane, sure… which then takes off with his checked baggage still on board, a major security faux pas these days. More startlingly, when the plane does indeed blow up, he merely gets quizzed for a few hours by two FBI agents, and is then released into the custody of his parents. Pull that shit now, and you’d be getting waterboarded before you could say “Guantanamo Bay,” white American male or not.

That aside, this is a solid entry, offering a nice twist on the traditional slasher concept. Instead of the unstoppable masked killer, it’s an unstoppable universal force, in the shape of Death, manipulating the world to attack its targets, after they have escaped its initial net. Interestingly, there’s not much supernatural as such in its methods; water flowing backwards after the victim in the bath-tub is about as implausible as it gets. Otherwise, it seems Death is a bit of a slacker, leisurely pursuing those on whom it has set its sights, with the necrotic equivalent of pool trick-shots, each preceded by a raspy, “Waaaaatch thisssssss….”. Surely a swift bolt of lightning would prove more efficient? Hell, it takes almost six weeks after the accident before Death finally shows up. What else, exactly, was the Grim Reaper doing all this time?

The sequels increasingly became exercises in spectacular snuff porn, a cinematic version of /r/watchpeopledie. Now this is not necessarily a bad thing: courtesy of FD2, any time we’re driving on the highway behind a poorly-secured load, Chris or I will inevitably mutter to the other, “Final Destination moment…”. In comparison to what followed, most of the deaths here seem relatively prosaic, save for teacher Valerie Lewton (many of the characters are named in nods to classic horror films). Though they’re no less impactful for it: indeed, the one death everyone remembers [spoiler, obvs] is so shocking entirely because there’s zero build-up to it. Alfred Hitchcock once expounded on the difference between suspense and surprise. While he’s not wrong, you’d be hard pushed to condemn the surprise this moment provides the film, as inferior in any way to its more suspenseful elements.

I’m still not quite convinced there’s any genuine logic here, despite the helpful use of visual aids by Alex to chart out which individual death has lined up next – the ability to multi-task not apparently being among Mr. Reaper’s strengths. Is it the order they died on the plane? Reverse order? Or reverse order, skipping every second person whose name contains a D? Still, at least it tried to provide something of a plot, which is more than can be said for most of those sequels. And while the performances are mostly adequate, Tony Todd, as a mortician who represents the nearest we get to the personification of Death, steals the entire movie. If the deaths became more gruesome going forward, I’m not sure what follows represented an overall improvement in quality.

This article is part of 31 Days of Horror.

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[Original review] The best character in this film has no lines and is never seen – at least directly, for I mean G. Reaper, Esq. A bit miffed when six kids and one teacher manage to avoid a plane crash, GR decides to off them anyway, using a variety of imaginative methods. Although this suggests Death has nothing better to do than chase dumb teens around, you can’t help but warm to such grimly fiendish stubbornness. And certainly, this shows more character than the humans: your first guess as to who’s going to survive will almost certainly be correct.

Still, the fatalities are spectacular, especially one contender for FMRT! moment of the year [as a clue, the last three letters stand for “…me, rewind that!”], though obviously you won’t get to do that in the cinema. While far stupider than you’d expect from X-Files alumni Wong and Glen Morgan, this is refreshingly free of Scream-style “irony”, with the daft premise played dead straight. The result is a well-handled vehicle for the consumption of popcorn, as well as providing valuable lessons in road and kitchen safety. B+

Final Destination 2 (2003)

Rating: B-

Dir: David R. Ellis
Star: A.J. Cook, Ali Larter, Michael Landes, T.C. Carson

The original movie crept out of nowhere to become one of 2000’s unsung gems, not least because of the finest unexpected death in a very long time. Probably wisely, the sequel doesn’t really try to push the same button, but certainly has its moments, not least one involving a sheet of plate glass which, while probably anatomically questionable, will merit much rewind and repeat on DVD. The format is almost identical; a premonition helps save some people from accidental death, only for the Grim Reaper to hunt them down, one by one. Can the pattern be broken while there are still survivors left?

Only Ali Larter and Tony Todd return from the first film, but as before, this is not really about characters – this is about interesting and spectacular ways of killing them off. It is slightly disappointing to see Death has abandoned the languid approach which worked so well first time round (in particular with the teacher), preferring sudden finality. But who can blame the scythy one for being impatient, when it has to provide a handy get-out clause – if the victims can only figure out what to do. Such dumbness in the exposition may well have you drumming your fingers as you await the next beautifully-executed killing, but you won’t have too long to wait (though a couple may seem curiously familiar if you’ve seen Resident Evil recently). And you’ll probably also find yourself very safety-conscious as you drive home from the cinema…

Final Destination 3 (2006)

Rating: C+

Dir: James Wong
Star: Mary Elizabeth Winstead, Ryan Merriman, Amanda Crew, Kris Lemche

This film is a machine for generating messy deaths: nothing more, but nothing less, either. With the least-famous cast of actors and actresses ever to populate a #1 box-office movie [though Lemche was the third lead in Ginger Snaps], they don’t so much create believable, sympathetic characters as… Well, remember the scene in The Wall where a conveyor belt carries an endless line of school-children into a meat-grinder? This is the feature-length version of that shot. Plotwise: see the first two, replacing the plane and car crashes from the first two, with a roller-coaster accident. A premonition saves a handful of teenagers, who are then picked off in spectacularly gruesome ways by the Grim Reaper, while the steadily-diminishing survivors try to foil death’s plan.

To their credit, the film-makers know what we want to see: impressively splattery deaths, though for my personal tastes, most were too CGI-heavy. However, the initial roller-coaster didn’t live up to the spectacular freeway massacre from last time, and that left a palpable sense of disappointment which the rest of the film struggled somewhat to overcome: the narrow grouping of the targets didn’t help, since the characters are almost interchangeable cliches: the jock, the goth, the bimbo (okay, you get two topless teens for the price of one). The arcane sense of death carefully stringing together small, harmless events into an avalanche of potential carnage is also largely absent. On the other hand, it certainly has many moments of sick invention and black humour, will still put you off fun-fairs with admirable efficiency, and as noted in FD2, is likely to have you driving home from the cinema extremely carefully. Given the lack of genuine story – or anything else to keep your interest – that’s not such a bad return.

The Final Destination (2009)

Rating: C+

Dir: David R. Ellis
Star: Bobby Campo, Krista Allen, Andrew Fiscella, Shantel VanSanten

I’ve been watching the Friday the 13th movies of late – reviews coming soon – and it struck me that the Final Destination series are the 21st century equivalent. They are, basically, slasher movies without an actual slasher. Wikipedia defines the genre as “involving a psychopathic killer stalking, and killing a sequence of victims in a graphically violent manner, often with a cutting tool,” which seems a close match, with the spectre of Death as the “psycho killer.” Certainly, there’s no doubt where the focus is here, and it’s not on the subtle characterizations or the intriguing plot. Add in that this was made in 3D, and you can see the creators are not very interested in the cinematic arts. That said, it doesn’t suck as entertainment for your lizard brain, even if it’s now far from a new concept and there’s nothing here to rival, say, the “bus moment” from the original.

The trigger here is a NASCAR accident, allowing for plenty of things to fly directly toward the camera. If you’ve seen the others, that’s all you need to know, as the rest follows exactly the same lines: survivors get picked off, and try to figure out how to break the chain. That’s all you need to know, and by this point, no-one is bothering to pretend otherwise. Perhaps due to the 3-D aspect, a lot more of this seemed digital than before, which still isn’t as convincing as physical effects. However, there are still sufficient moments of crunchy goodness to justify its existence. Quite why this one should be called The, rather than A Final Destination escapes me, and one wonders what they might title any future entries. That Final Destination? Who can say. Regardless, while I can’t recommend spending any money on this, it delivers what you expect, and if you enjoyed the previous movies, will likely find this one passable entertainment.

Final Destination 5 (2011)

Rating: B-

Dir: Steven Quale
Star:  Nicholas D’Agosto, Emma Bell, Miles Fisher, Arlen Escarpeta

Back when I reviewed the previous entry, I wrote that the Final Destination series was the 21st century equivalent of the Friday the 13th franchise. We can now tick off another point of similarity, because The Final Destination proved not as definitive as the title claimed, any more than The Final Chapter was the last outing for Jason Vorhees. Indeed, FD5 came out in less time after the previous film than any of its predecessors. It is, of course, more of the same. An impending accident is foreseen by Sam Lawton (D’Agosto), who is able to save a number of people from their preordained fate. Death then sighs heavily, probably mutters “Not again…”, and starts tidying up the left-overs in gruesome and inventive ways.

The wrinkle here is that the survivors discover they can dodge their fate by triggering the death of someone not expected to die. Their remaining lifespan then gets transferred to the person responsible. I don’t recall that being a thing previously, though with a decade since we saw the previous entry – I’m not sure quite why we took so long to watch this – I can’t say for sure. It does add an interesting new wrinkle to proceedings, with the victims having to solve the moral dilemma of whether their life is more valuable than someone else’s. It also delivers a finale which brings things full-circle quite beautifully. The mentions of Paris, which seem like just one of the film’s nods to the previous entries, e.g. the ominous logging truck, prove to be rather more than that.

But we’re here for the fatalities, which are a bit of a mixed bag. The most gruesome one, shown above, is likely the most prosaic: despite the complexity, the victim simply fails to stick the landing (unlike the movie). My personal favourite was the sleazy guy who goes for a massage, and shall we say, doesn’t get the happy ending he wants. This selection is both because he is likely depicted as the movie’s most unpleasant character, and his death is a nicely complex, Rube Goldbergian entity. It harks back to the fate of Ms. Lewton in the original movie, in the way it’s teased out, with escape dangled in front of the victim, before being snatched away. Even without the 3D in which it was made, the sequence still works. Though for large-scale carnage, you can’t been the opening bridge disaster, which includes plummeting, bisection and impalement.

With nine years having passed since this came out, the series does appear to have gone at least dormant. Considering this was the best-received entry critically, and grossed four times its budget worldwide, proving audiences still had an appetite for bodily destruction, that is a bit of a surprise. Studios don’t generally let profitable franchises fade away, and plenty of other, less successful horror entities have received reboots or remakes. However, rumblings suggest a sixth entry is now being actively worked on, focusing on first responders. I hope Death enjoyed its holiday.

Final Destination: Bloodlines (2025)

Rating: B

Dir: Zach Lipovsky, Adam B. Stein
Star: Kaitlyn Santa Juana, Teo Briones, Rya Kihlstedt, Richard Harmon

Welcome back, unnecessarily complex but undeniably imaginative Grim Reaper. It’s been a while. But it was certainly worth the wait with a thoroughly crowd-pleasing exercise in death porn. This one begins in the sixties, with a disaster unfolding in a restaurant at the top of a skyscraper. I have been to the one in the Space Needle. I will no longer be going back. Mind you, for an even better sequence in a similar location, check out the climax of The Quake. It uses a piano too, albeit to less comedic effect. Anyway, this turns out to be a recurring dream of Stefani Reyes (Santa Juana), whose grandmother Iris had the premonition, and saved those present from death that day.

Iris’s subsequent realization that death was stalking, not just those people, but any descendants they shouldn’t have had, got her estranged from the family. Stefani tracks her down to learn the truth, and when her own family starts dying in the expected spectacular and messy ways, it’s up to her to find out how to defeat death’s plans. Naturally, it won’t be easy. There will be a lot of carnage before the final credits roll. Yet, surprisingly, we also get one of the most emotional moments in franchise horror, courtesy of the late Tony Todd (top). The actor does not look well at all, but his monologue is perfect, a fitting tribute to a horror icon. I genuinely teared up for a moment.

Enough soppiness. Back to the death porn. My main criticism would be an excessive reliance on CGI rather than practical effects, apparent from the moment Iris meets her maker. However, I am not inclined to carp too much, because the things they are doing are not just lazy replacements like CGI blood-spatter. Instead, it’s stuff you would be very hard pushed to do physically, and I’m okay with that. No question about the peak set-piece. A 2-for-1 special nvolving an MRI machine which goes up to eleven. I’m not sure if the results depicted are genuinely possible – I’ll defer to any medical professionals on that. They certainly exhibit a twisted imagination matching anything in the previous five movies.

I actually liked the characters more than expected as well. While most of the young people in the series are little more than NPC’s crossed with stickmen, Stefani’s cousin, Erik (Harmon), is a genuine pleasure. The movie seems to lean into the black comedy aspects more too, such as with a discussion in a hospital about killing babies, in order to max out the lifespan you’d get. At 110 minutes, it runs significantly longer than any of its predecessors (which averaged 91), and I was worried it would feel padded to that end. I’m pleased to report this is not the case, and I was legitimately engaged from the first moment until the final credits rolled. I’ve a strong feeling the franchise itself has successfully managed to cheat death. More power to it.